by Sarah May
With an effort, Kate remembered that she was still on the phone to Evie. ‘Listen, I’ve got to go—’
‘Well, don’t forget to keep me updated on the house, and if you change your mind about the chickenpox party just drop init’s open house.’
Kate started to walk slowly back towards the house.
As she went indoors, she heard Margery’s voice shouting at Findlay to stop scratching his eczema, and was about to say something when the doorbell started to ring.
Findlay ran to answer it and there were Jessica and Arthur on the doorstep.
‘Margery!’ Kate yelled, surveying Jessica’s strange attire. Jessica was as much an indicator of what not to wear as Ros was of what to wear. ‘I think you’ve seriously saved her life by taking her off my hands today,’ Kate hissed, leaning forwards. ‘And listenI just found out from Evie that Ros put her house on the market as well. I had no idea Ros was thinking of moving.’
‘She rang me Fridayshe’s put it on with Foxtons.’
‘Friday? She hasn’t said anything to me.’
‘Well, from what she said, they’re doing pretty much what you’re doingdownscaling in London and buying somewhere either in Kent or…I can’t remember where else she said. Anyway, she’s keen to stay in the catchment area for St Anthony’s because she doesn’t want Toby to lose his place.’ Jessica smiled. ‘Hi, Margery,’ she said as Margery appeared in the hallway behind Kate. ‘You’ve changed your hair.’
Margery’s hands went to her hair, self-conscious. Then she smiled.
‘The parting’s on the other side and the colourno, it’s not the colour that’s changed. You’ve got curls.’
‘Natural curls,’ Margery said, proudly.
‘I never knew you had curls. Lovely,’ Jessica added.
Kate and Margery, now standing side by side, paused awkwardly, aware that they had never and would never have a conversation like that.
‘Findlay!’ Kate called out, suddenly nervous.
Findlay came rushing through the women and past them into the outside world, a Spiderman rucksack on his back, already wearing his goggles and with a bucket shaped like a castle in his hand, yelling ‘Arthur!’, with no thoughts of anything but what was ahead.
Kate, unsure of herself under Jessica’s frank, smiling gaze, let him go and didn’t insist on the usual parting rituals. ‘Got everything?’ she said to Margery.
Margery nodded, patting the handbag that rarely left her side.
‘We should be back about fiveI’ll give you a ring when we set off. Oh, Kate, I meant to saywe’ve had another offer made on the Beulah Hill house…’ Jessica hesitated. ‘It’s Ros, actually.’
‘Ros?’ Kate yelled.
Jessica paused awkwardly. ‘Ros’s house has only just gone on the market as well. Mr Jackson’s considering both offers.’
‘How much was Ros’s offer?’
‘I can’t sayit’s confidential.’
‘Jessica…’
Jessica was turning to leave with Margery when she stopped suddenly. ‘You don’t know if anybody’s got a dachshund that’s gone missing…?
‘A dachshund?’ Kate said, vaguely.
‘I saw one in the garden last night.
Kate shook her head. ‘A dog kept me awake a few nights ago, but…a dachshund?’
‘What else would it be?’
‘A fox?’ Margery said suddenly. ‘I’ve seen foxes in the garden. The other night I thought I heard somethingopened the curtains and there was this pair of eyes staring in at me through the patio windows. Nearly died, I did.’ Margery paused, going back to the night before and the eyes at the window. At the time, she’d thought it was the rapist next door, Mr Hamilton; that had been her first thought.
Jessica shook her head. ‘It’s much smaller than a fox.’
‘Maybe you’ve got rats then.’
‘It’s not a rat.’
‘You want to watch it’s not ratsI’m sure I saw something near the bins here the other day. Rats can be bigbigger than you think. And this is London. I’d get someone to come and have a look,’ she said to Jessica. ‘You might have rats.’
Chapter 27
Ros was at the printers in Bellenden trying to get the Carpe Diem merchandise ready for the street party. She’d stopped using the printers on Lordship Lane when the ‘No Buggies’ sign went up.
The printerwho was bipolartucked his longish grey hair behind his ears and leant forward, peering at Ros’s printout. ‘Carpe Diem,’ he said, sounding pleased.
Ros gave a quick smile and maintained her impatient posture. ‘I’m going to need five hundred postcards, two hundred A-five leafletsand twenty posters initially. I was thinking about T-shirts as wellI don’t know, twenty or something?’
The printer nodded, as if he was thinking about this.
Ros paused. ‘Does that sound okay?’
‘Carpe Diem,’ he said again, grinning suddenly at her this time and showing two rows of teeth that looked as though they’d suffered subsidence and had been left hanging from what remained of his gums.
Ros tried not to look. Dentists were happy to arrange instalment payments for care plans these days. Why couldn’t people just look after themselves?
The printer was still leaning over the counter, waiting for her to respond to his persistent repetition of the words ‘carpe diem’, and this was having a strange effect on Ros. She felt increasingly violent towards him and wasn’t entirely sure she’d be able to stop herself grabbing hold of his hair and smashing his face against the counter if he repeated the words ‘carpe diem’ one more time. She’d never experienced such a surge of violence before.
‘I want everything two-tone,’ she said tersely. ‘Black and pink.’
The printerfortunatelygave up then, slumping over his counter as though his world had just died and he was trying to come to terms with it. ‘Black on pink or pink on black?’
‘Black on pink. I want the pink matt and the black typeface glossy.’
‘Raised on the postcards?’
She shook her head.
‘What sort of typeface?’ He pushed the book towards her and she scanned it efficiently, relieved to feel the violence subsiding.
‘Nothing too rounded.’
‘Okay, well I’ll do a mock-up and you can take a look at it, let me know if you’re happy and we’ll go from there.’
‘You had some A-five leaflets for me to collect as well.’
‘What’s the name?’
‘Granger.’
He rifled, distracted, through the wire tray on the counter and handed her an envelope with the street party flyers inside.
‘Should I pay for these now?’
He waved the idea of payment aside, as though he was too depressed to consider making a living right then. ‘Later…’
Ros shrugged, then stepped out of the printers into the mid-morning heat.
Bellenden had been regenerated, which meant there were more white homeowners living there than black tenants. Mr Walsh, the glazier, had taken an unprecedented number of calls from new homeowners over the past two years, all wanting the same thingthe panels above the front door glazed with the house number, and fleur-de-lys panels put in the front door itself. A dog’s grooming parlour had recently opened, and Antony Gormleywho used to live in the area before making enough money to move to north Londonhad designed the balustrades on the pavements. Despite Antony Gormley’s presence and the fleur-de-lys glazing in the majority of front doors, Ros still didn’t feel safe, and her eyes skittered nervously over two youths now making their way towards her.
They aren’t making their way towards me, she reminded herself, they’re making their way down the street. Soon we’re going to pass. She walked into the damp shade beneath the railway bridge. The youths’ eyes looked flatly into hers.
Their pit-bull strained on its leash, froth trickling from the corners of its mouth.
‘Fuck it Tyrone,’ one of the youths said, in a high-pitched voice.
A girl’s voice. They were girls, Ros realised, elated with relief. Girls immersed in genderless street gear. Then she remembered reading somewhere that girl gangs were on the rise and that some even used gang rape as an initiation ceremony. The dog looked as if it had been trained to rapemaybe the ‘fuck it Tyrone’ was a command.
They were drawing level, the girls, and Tyrone, spread across the pavement. Ros’s left shoulder was scraping along the inside of the railway arch. The moment had arrived. They were going to close in on her.
Her heart thumping, they carried on walking, the flat stares shifting to someone or something else. Only Tyrone gave her a froth-ridden backwards glance.
She carried on walking towards the sunlight, aware that she was actually shaking, and didn’t feel herself again until she’d finished distributing street party leaflets to all the shops on Lordship Lane. All the shops, that is, apart from William Hill, the Co-operative funeral parlour, Favourite chicken barand Starbucks, which the PRC had made a point of boycotting since it opened a year ago.
Once this was done, she got back in the car, aware that she had to be at Evie’s in under ten minutes. She drove to Prendergast Road via Beulah Hill. As she passed No. 8, she saw someone she recognised by the front gate. Ignoring the refuse lorry behind her, Ros stopped the car and leant over the passenger seat. The day had looked suddenly dull through the lenses of her wraparounds.
‘Harriet?’
Harriet hadn’t anticipated this.
The encounter with Ros was so unanticipated, in fact, that she could do nothing but stand and stare.
Ten minutes ago she’d parked her car outside No. 8 Beulah Hill and rung on the peach-coloured door. It was the first time she’d gone round since they’d written the letter and sent it to Admissions.
No answer.
She tried again and, this time, Mr Jackson’s face appeared in the bay window.
The front door opened.
He didn’t seem surprised to see a woman he didn’t recognise standing on his doorstep with a child in a car seat hanging from her right arm.
‘I’m sorry to bother you…,’ Harriet started.
Mr Jackson cut in with, ‘You come to see the house?’
Harriet paused. ‘Actually…no. We’ve just moved to the area and I’ve got a feeling our post is being sent to your address by mistake.’
Mr Jackson considered this.
In the house behind him, a gospel choir was singing.
‘The name’s Burgess. Have you had any mail for Burgess?’
‘I don’t know what comes through the door. Nothing but rubbish most of the time.’ He pausedand forgot what they’d been talking about.
‘So, nothing for Burgess then?’ Harriet prompted him.
He stared back at her, confused. ‘You want to come in?’
‘Well…’
‘Come oncome in.’ He walked down the hallway away from her, towards the kitchen.
Harriet checked the street behind her then followed him in.
It was dark inside and it took her a while to get used to the light. The house smelt as though the bath was rarely used and the decor was pre-credit. Threadbare carpets, scratched, chipped and stained G-Plan furniture, which a woman’s pride had covered in crocheted runners in order to conceal the more obvious defects.
Mr Jackson stopped in the middle of the kitchen and smiled expectantly at her.
It occurred to Harriet that he had no memory of just having spoken to her on the front doorstep. Did he think she was Meals on Wheels?
‘We were talkingjust now.’
He nodded, the first sign of worry creeping over his face.
‘Some of our post might have been delivered to your house by mistake?’
In the background, the choir on TV were in a state of exultation.
‘I throw so much stuff away,’ he muttered to himself, then caught sight of a pile of letters by the cooker.
He picked these up and handed them to Harriet.
She rifled uncomfortably through the unopened bills, Iceland promotions and half-completed scratch cards. Nothing for the Burgesses.
‘Nothing?’
She shook her head. ‘D’you mind if I pop round again? I’ve contacted the post office, but—’
‘Nobody wants to work these days,’ Mr Jackson put in. ‘No, they don’t want to work. You see them around, they don’t want to work. They’re all the samewant something for nothing.’
Harriet wasn’t listening. She wanted to get back to her car. ‘I’d better get going.’
She made her way back up the hallway towards the front door, glancing into the synthetic opulence of the lounge as she passedat a glistening sewing machine on a well caredfor sideboard.
‘D’you sew?’ Mr Jackson asked suddenly.
‘Do I sew?’
‘You look like you might sew. My wife used to sew. That’s her machine over there. She used to be a dressmaker. Maybe you want to take the machinenone of my children sews.’
‘I couldn’t…’
‘But you sew.’
‘I used to…’
‘Welltake it.’
Harriet was about to respond when the doorbell rang. Mr Jackson shuffled past her and stood staring at the woman filling the doorway.
‘Uncle Alex? It’s me, Jadecome to check up on you.’
Mr Jackson continued to stare at his niece, until suddenly, ‘Jade!’
She stepped, smiling, into the hallwaythen she saw Harriet backed against the wall with Phoebe hanging from her right arm. She stared expectantly at her.
Mr Jackson seemed as surprised as his niece to see Harriet in his hallwaydespite having just offered her his wife’s sewing machine.
‘I came to see the house,’ Harriet lied.
Jade nodded slowly.
Mr Jackson smiled at the two women. ‘Who wants a drink?’
‘Didn’t the estate agent come?’
‘No. They phoned your unclehe was happy for me to come on my own.’
‘I told them not to do thathe’s got slight Alzheimer’s. Somebody should be here with him to do the viewing.’
‘I’m sorrythey said it was okay. Anyway…’ Harriet started to move towards the front door, which was still open.
‘I should tell you…’
Harriet stopped, suddenly alarmed.
‘We’re thinking of taking the house off the market.’
‘Whose house?’ Mr Jackson asked.
‘Ohthat’s a shame.’
‘I meant to contact the agent this morning.’
Harriet nodded, and held her left hand out to Mr Jackson. ‘Well, thank you anyway.’
Mr Jackson shook it warmly, pressing a Fox’s glacier mint into her hand. ‘For the baby.’
She hesitated a moment, then quickly left. The front door shut behind her and she made her way, with relief, back to the car.
She got as far as the gateand there was Ros parked in the middle of the road, staring at her.
‘Harriet?’
Harriet stopped.
This was almost as bad as the time just after Phoebe was born when Ros had seen her through the window at Starbucks even though she’d managed to get a seat at the back near the toilets. PRC members were meant to go to the small local café across the road, even though there was no pushchair access and no baby change. Harriet had wheeled the newborn Phoebe into Starbucks and collapsed with relief into a crumb-ridden club chair. Ros had just come up on her and thenas nowshe didn’t have an answer.
‘Not thinking of moving house, are you?’ Ros joked, omitting to mention that she was.
‘No,’ Harriet said flatly, unable to think of anything else to sayor even begin to offer an explanation.
Ros continued to watch her. Harriet, she decided, wasn’t to be relied on. Eviedespite her often hysterical unpredictabilitycould be relied on to stick her neck out for you. Harriet’s ‘no’ was insurmountable.
‘Are you going to Evie’s?’
‘In about hal
f an hour.’
‘See you there.’ Ros paused, put the car into gear then headed on to Prendergast Road.
As she drove, she phoned Jessica. ‘Jessica?’
‘I can’t talkI’m driving.’
‘Harriet hasn’t said anything to you about moving house, has she?’
‘No, why?’
‘I’ve just seen her outside Number eight Beulah Hill.’
‘No idea. And Ros? I had to tell Kate you’d put an offer in as well.’ Silence. ‘Maybe you should phone her.’
‘Maybe,’ Ros agreed. ‘But what I want to know iswhy was Harriet at Number eight Beulah Hill…?’
‘Ros, I don’t knowI’m on the M-twenty-threeI’ve got to go.’
Five minutes later, Ros was knocking on the door to No. 112 Prendergast Road.
Evie answered, holding a jug of Pimms in one hand, and sucking on a piece of cucumber. She said, ‘Hi!’ Then, ‘Aggie’s dyspraxic.’
Chapter 28
‘Ros, I don’t knowI’m on the M23I’ve got to go.’
Jessica rang off. It wasn’t just warm, it was hotunseasonably hot. The air was barely moving and it was more like a day in mid-August than early May.
After forty-five minutes on the M23 they turned onto the A27 towards Shoreham and the house on Marine Drive that Jessica’s dad, Joe, had bought nearly twenty years ago, after selling his companyQuantum Kitchens.
‘Hope you don’t mind her offloading me on you,’ Margery said.
‘Course not,’ Jessica laughed, a warm complicity passing between the two women.
Margery’s eyes noted with approval the conifers and rock garden at the front of the house as they pulled onto the driveand the double-glazed rose in the front door when they rang the bell.
